[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder

by Agata Stanford

  “Dorothy, I’d like you to meet Dr. Richard Hartley.”

  “Hello, again.”

  “You’ve met?” said Soledad, and then, responding to Woodrow’s demand for attention, patted his head. He gave her a paw to shake.

  “I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Parker—”

  “Dorothy, please—”

  “—Dorothy . . . this morning, although under less favorable conditions.”

  “Moonlight and stardust are far more favorable, I agree, Dr. Hartley.”

  “Richard, please.”

  “All right, Richard it is.”

  “Richard and I go way back, don’t we, darling,” said Soledad.

  “Oh, since the Ice Age, surely.”

  “We’ve slept together, you know.”

  “Bed partners, we!”

  “Très moderne. I suppose I should be shocked,” I said with a laugh. “But, you do make a dashing pair.”

  “That’s what our mothers said—when we were babies.”

  “Our mothers were lifelong friends, you know, and they had plans for us to be together from the time we shared a crib.”

  “But, it didn’t work out, did it, Sollie?”

  “Alas, no, much to my regret.”

  “You say that now, my dear!” He turned to me and continued, “But she was always so damned promiscuous, you see; men worship her, and I just never stood a chance—”

  “Don’t believe a word of it, Dorothy. He threw me over—oh, yes, you did!—for a life of service.”

  “You make it sound as if I’m somebody’s footman.”

  Soledad let loose a cackling laugh, and when she threw back her head, the ends of the diaphanous scarf took flight in the wind. She was quite a beautiful woman, and the moonlight made her strikingly lovely, softening the sharp angles of her cheekbones and the determination of her chin. “I warn you, Dorothy: Be careful. He may appear harmless—”

  “Really, Sollie, you are outrageous. What is Mrs. Parker—Dorothy—supposed to think. Now I haven’t a chance to impress her with my charm.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure,” clucked Soledad.

  She was right, of course. Richard Hartley was a charming man, I could see that even more now than when he rushed to our aid this morning. I could feel the pull of attraction. As I am susceptible to charm, I chalked it up to moonglow and the lunar pull of the tides.

  Chapter Four

  Mr. Benchley, Hem, Mathew, and Saul appeared at the door of my cabin a half hour before dinner for their promised refreshment. Mr. Benchley and Saul were elegantly dressed in eveningwear, while Hemingway and Mathew dressed up their dark suits with black ties, and might’ve been mistaken for waiters but for Hem’s old boots peeking out from under his trouser cuffs and Mathew’s addition of spats over patent leathers. Soledad and Richard Hartley had accepted my invitation and I introduced Richard as the gentleman who’d come to our assistance earlier in the day, and lots of clever barbs were tossed around about how, once you save a life, you are forever responsible to the person you rescued from death.

  “Of course, I didn’t save him,” said Richard. “T’was a crewman hauled him up out of the sea. I just looked him over, made sure he’d suffered no injuries, after the fact.”

  “And I was so looking forward to your indentureship. I could use somebody to watch over me and see to my dry cleaning!” said Mr. Benchley.

  “Your dress is divine, Dorothy,” said Soledad, admiring the one extravagance I had allowed myself when I went shopping for clothes for the voyage. A lovely little number called out to me. First, the color—a vibrant, blood-red silk velvet—then the sparkle—it seemed to shimmer on its hanger as I approached it, a provocative little light-dance that gave it life, and I was mesmerized. And when I tried it on, despite the fact that I was wearing dark stockings and my sensible shopping shoes, a glance in the mirror made me fall in love with myself. I had to have it. I have to admit that with the embellishments of jewelry and my hair under the control of a red embroidered bandeau, I clean up quite nicely.

  I thanked Soledad for her compliment while admiring her pale-green silk frock, paneled along the sides with an intricate overlapping star-motif embroidery of blue and dark-green threads, and the matching bejeweled toque across her brow, cut in the shape of five points. She looked like a jaunty, modern Statue of Liberty.

  “Poiret?” I asked.

  “No. It’s Nicole Groult.”

  A knock on the door, and a steward handed Mr. Benchley a note.

  “Oh, good, they’ve found my golf clubs and put the bag in my cabin,” he said, tipping the young man.

  “Clubs? And where and when do you expect to—”

  “Have you seen Versailles? What better place to practice my drive? From the Water Parterre, the Grand Canal and on toward the horizon—what a fairway!”

  I considered the potential destruction to lawn and statuary, and then remembered who awaited our arrival in Paris. “I suppose if Aleck and Harpo could pierce the lawn with their croquet wickets, who’s to complain?”

  “It took us three days, twenty-two hours, and twenty-nine minutes before the actual rescue. When the gale abated, we launched a lifeboat,” recalled Captain Fried.

  Dinner at the captain’s table once again, but tonight included the Russian Duchess Sofia Louise and her companion, Major Alfred Arbuthnot, both of whose presence seemed to have the effect of subduing the quarrelsome tendencies of Ronnie, otherwise known as the Marquis Ronald Everett Hampton-Crispin-Jones, and his girlfriend, Lady Daphne Twinton.

  I very much wanted to hear the tale of the Duchess’s life in St. Petersburg, to be privy to the details of the attempted escape into exile of the slaughtered Tsar and his family, but there was really no chance of pursuing that at dinner, especially for the fact that Hem and Mathew pressed Captain Fried to continue the tale of his rescue of the Antinoe, interrupted the evening before when the captain had been called away from the table.

  “So when I believed it safe to launch the lifeboat with members of our crew to effect a rescue, a violent gale caused a rogue wave to smash the vessel against the ship’s side,” continued the captain. His expression turned dark as he continued.

  “We lost two men, two of our valiant crew—Boson’s Mate Ernest Heitman and Crewman Uno Wirtanen, both twenty-eight years old. They could not be recovered.”

  Hemingway was enthralled by the sea tale of danger and heroism. And Mathew, a newspaperman, having read all the wire stories of that fateful storm and rescue, began to interview the captain. There was another story here. I could see the wheels turning in his head as the captain talked of other sea rescues in which he had played an instrumental role. There were his days as quartermaster aboard the cruiser The Washington. “During stormy weather out in the Pacific, a destroyer got adrift, having snapped a line, and then, as chief quartermaster of the Tonapah, I assisted a disabled submarine off the coast of Hatteras.”

  This man was courting disaster, I thought. When would his luck run out and the ship he commands become the object of rescue? Please, God, please, not this voyage.

  “Then there was that fateful time aboard the Minneapolis in ’ought-six—we were on our way from Philadelphia to Havana . . . .”

  Saul Gold suddenly appeared at our table and asked Daphne for a dance.

  “Some other time,” she said dismissively. “Captain Fried is telling us about his many escapades at sea, and it’s just too fascinating to give up, you see.”

  “When can we—”

  “Dance?” said Ronnie, half-rising from his chair like a wounded tiger about to pounce.

  “I was speaking to Daphne. Daff?”

  “You’re tight, Saul,” she replied.

  “Yes, I’m tight, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m a little tight, too,” said Daphne.

  “Why not say what you want to say, Gold, right here, right now, so everybody can hear it?” There was real hatred and challenge in his voice. “Daphne has no secrets from me, now do you, darlin
g?” Ronnie nuzzled her cheek and she made a small gesture to push him away.

  “Captain Fried,” Daphne prefaced, determined not to get caught up in a melee, “how old were you when you first went off to sea?”

  “It was during the Spanish War—”

  “Saul,” I said when I looked at Daphne and Ronnie and Hemingway (who despised all weak men), and saw the sheer contempt on their faces. Humiliated, the raw agony Saul was suffering was unbearable to watch. His face grew dark. Of course, he had overstepped some arbitrary line, but he was driven with burning desperation and the cruelty with which he was handled made me angry.

  “Let’s foxtrot!” I said, as the orchestra had just broken into a peppy rendition of “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.”

  I got up and grabbed his hand before he could protest and he reluctantly followed me onto the dance floor.

  “I apologize, Dorothy,” he said, contrite now. “I’m a little tight.”

  I feared he would start crying, as all miserable drunks eventually do when they behave badly or find their loneliness unbearable. “Please forgive me. I made a fool of myself.”

  “What’s to forgive? I do it all the time,” I said, as he mindlessly led me around the dance floor.

  “It was stupid of me to book on this ship.”

  “It’s obvious you are mad about her.”

  “She despises me.”

  “I’m sorry, Saul.”

  “And I thought . . . I thought—you know? I thought she—why else would she have gone off with me those two weeks?” he continued, almost in tears, frustrated in his struggle to understand how things had come to this. “Why, if she didn’t—care?”

  There was nothing I could say to him. He was in love with Daphne, and Daphne had spurned him. I stated the fact as I knew it: “Well, she and Ronnie are engaged.”

  “I know that. She doesn’t love him, though.”

  “And he knows that you—”

  “He knows it all. She told him everything and they’ve had a good laugh about it, I’ll bet. And now I see she’s got eyes for your friend—”

  “Mr. Benchley?”

  “The handsome one, Hemingway.”

  Yes, I thought, it doesn’t surprise me. I could see that queer, violent attraction made all the more acute for the conquering.

  As Saul moved me around the dance floor, surprisingly graceful without his cane, his eyes drawn across the room trying to keep sight of her, I wondered what I could do to show him the futility of his determined pursuit of Lady Daphne Twinton.

  What is it about some of us that we cannot let go when we’ve been let go of?

  “I’ve money, now; I’m not poor anymore.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve plenty of money.”

  “I know, Saul.”

  “I thought . . . .”

  “Yes, Saul, I know.”

  “Can’t get a goddamn drink on this raft! I want a drink.”

  “All right, Saul, let’s go get one; we both need a drink, don’cha think?”

  As we started off the dance floor, Mr. Benchley met us with the cane Saul had left on my chair. Mr. Benchley had been keeping an eye on us as we danced; I’d glimpsed his face through the crowd. The three of us, and Richard and Soledad, left the music, the tales of heroic rescue, and a general malice as we walked toward Mr. Benchley’s cabin.

  The next morning, around ten-thirty, with Woodrow in tow, I knocked on Mr. Benchley’s door. He opened it, and through the crack I saw Saul lying on the bed, a blanket thrown over him. I had left Mr. Benchley’s cabin soon after Saul had passed out on the sofa a little before midnight. Mr. Benchley eased out through the door as quietly and gingerly as a thief, and told me he had put him to bed shortly after Soledad, Richard, and I had gone. “He got up once, poured himself a scotch, and then went back to sleep.”

  We walked to the dining room for breakfast. No one from the evening before was present, which for me was quite a relief, so we sat at a small table and ordered coffee, juice, and rolls. The Duchess Sofia Louise entered on the arm of Major Arbuthnot, and their shaky advance across the room, legs and canes flailing about, brought to mind a smashed bicycle wheel, bent, with broken spokes jutting this way and that. Our eyes met, and Mr. Benchley stood to offer the couple to join us. After some adjustments, the two were seated and gave the waiter their orders.

  “You should be commended, my dear,” said the Duchess.

  “I’ve never received a commendation!”

  “All the same,” she insisted, and the slight tremor that bobbed her little white head became a nod of approval.

  I smiled back. She seemed to like me, not even knowing what I could really be like, so I found her charming. It’s always easy to like people who like you. “Now, what would I do with a commendation?”

  “We’ll pin it on your dress,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “Like a corsage . . . . Now, tell me exactly why I should be honored?”

  The Major finished stirring his coffee and laid down the spoon. “You were kind to that poor young man, you both were,” he said, looking over at Mr. Benchley, “when others were rude.”

  “It is a sign of good breeding,” agreed the Duchess. “We don’t see much of that these days. Young people seem so . . .”

  “So careless,” said Major Arbuthnot.

  “Why, your little dog, named after your dead president, has impeccable manners,” said the Duchess. “Look how he sits there, like a little prince.”

  I refrained from being contrary. Woodrow wasn’t just sitting there; he was biding his time until the waiter brought his meal of scrambled eggs and breakfast sausages. And the Duchess had yet to be present on the occasions when he would lift his leg on a potted plant.

  But what they said was true. We were a careless generation. I think we have become so because so many young lives were sacrificed in the war, and no one who has survived has wanted to ever know sacrifice again. The prevailing philosophy is that life is too short not to live the years we have to their fullest. There remains a heavy pall of death in the air. It could all end tomorrow. It is fashionable to be outspoken, especially now that women have been unchained from lives of domestic drudgery, fashionable to discard the often crippling reserve of our Victorian parents, and to act in natural ways. Nobody seems to care any more about propriety.

  But this elderly couple, relics from another age, were right: Carelessness in the treatment of one’s fellow man can be cruel, and cruelty is never acceptable, never fashionable. And last night, cruelty reared its ugly head at Saul Gold.

  The waiter returned with our breakfasts, and I was glad for the interruption because my face burned from both guilt and embarrassment at being lauded. As Woodrow plowed into his food, I started to change the subject—my curiosity was piqued; I wanted to know more about the Duchess and the Revolution in Russia and how she saw it all—when suddenly Richard Hartley appeared standing over me and asked if he could join us. His color was high, he was a little out of breath, and around his neck, tucked into his shirt, was a hand towel. When I asked if he was all right, he answered that he had just completed an exercise jog around the deck.

  The waiter reappeared, and he gave his order—orange juice, coffee, ham, eggs, and sweet rolls—as he took the vacant chair next to Mr. Benchley’s.

  “It’s a lovely morning out there,” he said, after removing the towel from around his neck. “I should have asked for a glass of water,” he said to Mr. Benchley.

  Mr. Benchley reached out for his untouched glass of orange juice. “Have my juice, I haven’t touched it and I’ll take yours when it arrives.”

  “Thanks,” said Richard, reaching for the glass, which my friend had moved for easy reach.

  But, Richard must have miscalculated because the glass fell over, spilling the juice onto the table. He quickly threw the towel over the spill and was about to dab at the pool, when a hissing steam began to rise from off the cloth, forming an ever-widening hole through the linen.

&n
bsp; “I know orange juice is acidic, but this is crazy!” said Mr. Benchley, moving back in his chair as we watched the slow burn advance across the table.

  The Major said, “That’s acid, my boy, and it’s not of the citric variety!” Then, in a booming voice, “Waiter!”

  There was much fuss as waiters all responded at the same time to the alarm in his voice, one helping the Duchess to her feet, the others carefully folding up and removing the smoking linens from off the table, along with the glass in which was still contained an ounce of the offending liquid. The maître d’ took charge of it, and with righteous assurances proclaimed he would get to the bottom of how acid could have gotten mixed into a glass of juice. He then bounded out of the dining room and through to the kitchen to investigate.

  “To think, dear fellow, that you might have imbibed the contents of that glass!” bellowed the Major.

  “And I drank mine all up,” said the Duchess, as we all began an exodus out of the room.

  “Just an accident, I suspect,” said Mr. Benchley, trying to keep everyone calm. He was shaken, I could tell, because he kept smoothing his trim moustache with a forefinger. And there was a frown on Richard Hartley’s brow as he appeared to ponder that Mr. Benchley had had a close call.

  “This is outrageous!” he whispered, and sprinted from the table and across the dining room where our waiter was being grilled by a furious maître d’.